The Developmental Research Program (DRP) is an essential component to ensure the continuous success of The Ohio State University/MD Anderson Thyroid Cancer SPORE application. By soliciting and supporting high risk and high impact developmental projects, the DRP will infuse new ideas, new resources, and new technologies that are the driving elements of translational research. The fully developed projects will also provide the SPORE Director with a renewable source of projects that can replace existing SPORE projects, which have been completed or have not fulfilled specific translational expectations. The mission of this SPORE application is to improve therapeutic outcome and life quality for patients with thyroid cancer. Accordingly, the DRP will seek to fund a broad range of proposals from basic science investigation, population science, and innovative approaches that can be translated into better prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, and experimental therapeutics. Drs. Jhiang and Sherman will serve as Co-Leaders to implement an effective DRP. The aims of DRP are: (1) develop a rigorous process to advertise the available resources of the SPORE and to solicit proposals from investigators of broad range of expertise; (2) define a rigorous peer-review process to select meritorious proposals and to monitor annual progress of funded proposals; and (3) provide assistance to promote the funded proposals into full projects within the SPORE or into nationally funded independent grant applications. With the requested SPORE DRP fund and institutional commitnients from OSUCCC and MDACC, we anticipate in funding two new proposals in the year 1 and year 3, one new proposal in the years 2, 4, and 5. Accordingly, a total of seven DRP proposals will be funded throughout the five-year funding period of the SPORE. The two DRPs selected for year 1 are both technology driven, which will lead to new research direction and/or provide new avenue for our battle against thyroid cancer RELEVANCE (See instrucllons): The Developmental Research Program is a component of this Thyroid Cancer SPORE that will fund pilot projects to assist researchers exploring new ideas that will be eventually translated into a better care for thyroid cancer patients. The program will solicit proposals, review, provide funding and promote further development of the selected projects.